Night and Day, You Are the One

I cheated on my girlfriend because she wouldn't let me cum in her mouth. Its proof she doesn't love me, I told myself.

I knew why it mattered so much. I took her – all of her - in my mouth whenever I could. I lapped up her juices. I thrilled at the feel of her on my tongue. I played with her sexy little folds and delicate pieces with my lips, and tasted her out of pure lust. I loved the way she laughed and the way she wore a dress when we hit the town, and afterward I would gorge on her breasts, just to sample that hint of honey flavor that formed on her nipples. I needed her completely, and I wanted her to need me the same way.

I fantasized about getting her drunk, unzipping my pants and forcing myself into her mouth. I imagined locking her head in my hands while I rode the waves and spilled between her lips and onto her tongue. And then I imagined, after she tasted me, how she would want it again and again. I daydreamed about how it would change everything between us. I would be able to look over at her while we were driving to the grocery store and know that next to me sat a woman who I lusted over, and who in turn lusted over me.

But it never happened. She continued unaware of my secret need, and I contented myself with all the rest of her. With every opportunity I pushed her panties to the side, just so I could get a look at her ginger-colored pubic hair, tightly curled and laid atop her fair skin. The little triangle was framed by her curved hips and lithe legs, and the sight made me woozy with desire. That part, I imagined she understood. I told her to never shave it off. I loved it, I said. To me, that little triangle meant 'naked woman.' It said sex like a first glimpse of a playboy centerfold, before even you knew what sex was.

And then, with her ginger hair moist from my tongue and her juices I would find myself pushing my fingers into her with all of my unfocused lust. At those times I imagined I would reach into an unknown place of her desires, and then a turn would be found. I fantasized that with just the right touch, something would awaken within her and she would find the need unstoppable. I saw it in my waking dream: She would push me over hungrily and place her mouth around me and begin until there was nothing more to pull from me.

But instead we made love, had sex, performed intercourse. It was never pure lust, which to me meant something else. Lust was giving into a sexual urge which overwhelmed everything else. Lust was craving a person in a way that transcended reason, experience or biological drive. She can't be in love with me, I told myself, if she can't be in lust with me. I worked it out in a convoluted process that was cold and logical.

And then I cheated on her. In one evening I became one-of-those-guys. I woke up the next morning and felt a guilt I had never felt before. I washed the evening's smell from me in the bathroom sink and thought of Shakespeare, knowing that "out, damned spot" was written from a point of inescapable truth. The spot could never be removed. Over the next few weeks, I treated my girlfriend horribly, acting as if I had forgotten her birthday, ignoring calls, and waiting until she was asleep before I went to bed. The one call I answered from her was short and to the point. It's over, she said. I'm breaking up with you.

It was okay, though, because she didn't love me. I knew this. My version of lust / love could never be returned by her. My friends asked: what happened? What went wrong? We just didn't get along, I answered. We just weren't right for each other. I disguised and hid the truth behind a curtain of platitudes like everyone else did at such times.

My inner voice said: You hit the 'self destruct' button. You were unbalanced with her. Together, we were like two mismatched people on a teeter-totter, and her weight just couldn't overcome your inertia. And then, when the voice that spoke in my head returned, it sunk deep into my darkest places: you cheated on her. I vowed in return: I'll never do that again.

I buried myself in gym time. I rode my bike 200 miles a week. I sat down at work and avoided conversations. I turned wrenches on my dilapidated sports car. I found my beat-up saxophone from college and bought new reeds, and then slowly resurrected my old chops by playing two and then three octave scales and arpeggios. I crashed on my couch, and got up at 3:00 am because I couldn't sleep.

My friends saw that I was in trouble and dragged me out on the occasional Saturday night, but life had otherwise gotten small, confined and introverted. I worried that I was slowly becoming weird; the handful of conversations I had each day meant more and more to me, yet I was less likely to seek them out than ever.

And then I found Heidi, and all I thought I knew went crashing to the ground.

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She was one of those PhD types you sometimes see working behind the counter in bookstores. I took one look at her and knew she was made for a different life. And yet there she was. She kept brushing her hair off her face as she looked down to run items across the scanner. I heard the little "beep" far back in line, and her silver bracelets jingling with every movement.

I felt like an animal next to her. I read her nametag – Heidi – and stored it in my vault. When I was close to her, I imagined I could smell her hair, which was auburn in color, but somehow reminded me of vanilla. I handed her a ten dollar bill for my 'Sports Cars and Classics' magazine, and while she made change, my instinct jumped to her, sitting next to me on a drive to the grocery store. I knew I could look over at her and fill instantly with lust. But could she ever lust for me? We exchanged smiles and niceties for a moment, and then I was out the door, already searching for excuses to see her again.

Heidi twisted my lust / love fixation. She allowed my mind to wander further down a shadowy road. For the first time I started imagining impossible situations in which I would have complete control over a woman – over her. In my mind, there was no other way that I could ever have a girl with her beauty, with her effortless class; those clinking little silver bracelets, and that little push of hair behind her ear.

The next time I saw her was downtown, at The Cruise Room. It was two weeks after my bookstore sighting and the wild fantasies that it sprung. My friends arranged a 'drag-the-bum-out-on-the-town' Saturday night, which I protested, but was secretly glad for after we settled in. My eyes were fuzzy. I was knee-deep in my fourth Manhattan, and the whiskey smell tainted my breath. The hazy light bounced against the tall ceiling and the jazz-age vibe permeated the crowd. And then, in a lull, I saw that same figure, that same face.

There she was – Heidi. She was standing near the bar, among a group of girls and guys. Every so often she swept her hair off her forehead. It was the same gesture I had seen at the bookstore now changed in its appearance at a different venue: she, and all of her friends, out on the town.

I stole glances in between drinks. She was smiling and laughing. She threw her head back in abandon as a guffaw slipped from her lips. I watched her like a spy, feeling as if I was an interloper in her world. I felt ashamed at my two-week lust-filled imagings over her: A chair, a bed, some rope, a blindfold and nothing to stop me from having my with her, every way I wanted. Her silver bracelets clinked above the sound of cocktail glasses and conversation. There was nothing else to it. She was lovely.

I switched seats to keep my back to her, wishing that she would leave. Her beauty exposed my depravity. But my ears kept perked despite my efforts. I listened for words tinted with her voice, which might land in my vicinity. My group of friends drank and talked. We ordered another round, and then another. Cigars filled the air and filtered the light further. Eighty years ago, I imagined Pierce Arrows and Packards parked along the street, and their owners – flush with cash – leaving outrageously large tips when the alcohol was just right, as it was now.

And that was when I felt her hand on my shoulder. It could be no other. That soft moment was there, and for an instant, she – not me – controlled the other. I turned to look, already sure about the girl I would find standing next to me.

"Howdy, stranger." She said it with a tipsy smile, and I looked at her, capturing the sight and unable to respond. My brain clicked, and I managed a quick, "Hey there, partner." And before I could stand, she had removed her hand and slid like an old friend onto the cushion beside me.

I introduced her. "Everyone, this is Heidi." I said her name as if it had always been on the tip of my lips, knowing instead that I should have pretended to search my memory and then, finding nothing, asked if she would introduce herself. Yet I miraculously matched her face to a place and then to a name - despite the fact she had never told me hers. Obviously, I had read it off her nametag and committed it to memory.

From that, I felt she knew everything about me. My sad, tormented crush. My endless fantasies. My crazy need to find a girl that would let me – no... wanted me – to cum in her mouth. And in my twisty world, it could only be her.

Her thigh gently pushed against mine. I acted as if I were making extra room for her, but still managed to keep that subtle pressure of her leg on mine. I searched my mind for something witty to say, something funny and unexpected. Instead, she went straight for a soft spot in a voice that only I could hear: "Why didn't you come up to me and say 'hi'? I know you recognized me from the bookstore."

I confessed as a half-lie: "Because I thought you wouldn't remember me."

She looked at me, and I could see that she was at least as drunk as I was. She smiled. "Do you really think I wouldn't remember the guy who looked at me with those eyes you have?"

I remembered my stare, and blushed, turned red, and began the sweaty palm and upper lip moistening that anticipated a total brain shut down. "It's okay," she laughed and smiled to show me that indeed it was okay. "It's – uh – memorable from such a tall, big guy. What, do you play rugby or something?" Then she grabbed my arm, and made no small show of feeling my muscles.

It didn't help. My brain began its slow descent into a daze, whereby my expression changed to a half smile fueled by nervous exhaustion, alcohol, and adrenaline. But then a lucid thought managed its way to the surface: This is your only chance.

Somehow, we talked and I managed to avoid conversation killers: the bookstore, my work, her friends, my friends. She told me her story. How she spent the last four years in Mexico City. How she was with a guy, twenty years her senior. He was an American salesman who sold implants for knee replacement surgeries to Mexican doctors.

He was an ass. He isolated her. He thought she was rich, because of her parents, because of her education, because of her trips to the resorts of the Mediterranean, and because she knew all the towns along the Cote d'Azur. He tired to back her into a desperate situation where she had to marry him. She got his number - eventually. It took her three years. The last year she spent wrangling away from him. It was time to put down some roots, she said. Roots, with someone she actually cared about.

Her friends were leaving. She got up to go. "That's my ride." I must have looked like a rundown dog. "Don't worry," she said. "You know where to find me."

I wondered over her for the next week. I replayed her words. She wanted roots. She wanted love. I wanted lust / love. I checked and re-checked my memories of her: the lipstick she applied halfway through the evening, which brought her lips to the front of her face; the small creases that formed in her cheeks when she smiled wide; the way she pushed her hair behind her ear, and which made want to ask: "Does your hair bother you?" but then I thought - just listen and don't talk. She was in the prime of her life. Logic told me that I was too, but there was a gulf between us. Even I could see that. My lust / love obsession sent me sideways.

I played Cole Porter on my saxophone and ran his take on obsession in my head - "Only you beneath the moon and under the sun..." - until the apartment manager banged on my door and told me to shut up and go to sleep. My elegy to her was romantic but pointless. I would torture myself over her and it would end before it began.

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She glanced at the titles of books and magazines passing under the scanner, and I imagined she was secretly calculating the type of person buying the item. My self-imposed week of waiting was over, and as I walked into the bookstore, already I was returning to my wrecked inner thoughts. On a break she came over to talk. I asked her if she wanted to put down some roots with me. Tonight. Downtown.

She said, no. Maybe some other time.

Her answer was definitive in that polite way she had, and it devastated me. "And this is how it ends," I thought. I knew my sorrow passed across my face, across my body, across my voice. Why had I been hopeful? She offered no explanation and there was no avenue for a further connection with her. I didn't press for one. I knew what it meant. A little alcoholic giddiness that night which was revisited in the morning; a phone call from a better prospect lying in wait; any of a hundred different reasons all of which made perfect sense to me. She was lovely. I was an animal. At some point it must have shown.

It didn't take long till my friends were on me about another Saturday night. My dive into athletic escapism seemed disturbing. My bleary eyes met with a razor jaw line and my nightly routine of one-thousand pushups made me look like a convict out on a three day pass. Implicit in their repeated "let's go out and get some drink on" was a bigger meaning. Come back to normal life. We liked the old you better.

And there I was again. I was dipping waist deep into the Manhattans. I was swimming in a daze. I was trying to laugh at jokes that should have seemed funny. I was grappling with the fact that I wasn't right for a girl I obsessed over. It was a knife in my gut. A re-drawing of lines that I thought were gray enough to cross on occasion.

But it really wasn't complicated. It was simple and clear and definite. On nights like tonight, when those jazz-age sweethearts blew off advances from smitten men, their buddies would lean over and say "Give it a rest. She's out of your league, son."

"Yes, she is." It's as simple as that, and there's no need for more discussion.

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I headed out of the bar, around some corners, and then down the stairs into the basement of the old hotel and restaurant which formed the remainder of the building. The restrooms were oddly and distantly located from the bar, which meant most drunks never found them. I looked in the mirror and threw some water on my face. Even down here the atmosphere was from a different time. The ceilings were just a notch too low, which reminded me of how out-sized I had become.

I pushed through the door and into the hallway, and there she sat waiting on a bench - Heidi. I must have seemed like a half-wit, caught mid-yawn and still wiping water from my face. She seemed her elegant self, even dressed down, as if she just spur-of-the-moment decided to appear. She looked up and I knew she expected to find me, just like this. Disheveled. Awkward and brutish. I stopped, unable to understand her sudden appearance, her expression, or my place in her world.

She stood up, and brushed the hair from her forehead. "I knew I'd find you here."

I wanted to play the jilted lover. I wanted to be tough and resist whatever she threw at me. I wanted to shut her out by walking straight past. But I stood and my eyes must have said something that was overflowing from my heart. She put her hand against my chest, and I put my hands around her fingers to press them closer and hold that connection no matter what.

"I like you..." she said. And then she thought for a moment, as if reading my mind and the blind love I had for her. "...but not in that way."

She pushed open the door I had just walked through and saw that the room was empty, except for the reflections from the mirrors which showed her choosing a stall at the far corner. I followed her in. She sat me down on the toilet seat. She closed and latched the door behind us. She unbuttoned and unzipped my pants. A fleeting thought had me contemplating the number of drinks that had passed through my hands, and I wondered what that meant below the belt-line. I said her name, "Hiedi." She said nothing.

And then there she was. She looked just as I had fantasized, but there was no lipstick in her hurried appearance. There were no jingling bracelets to wonder over. I leaned forward and grabbed a handful of her hair, hoping for a sniff of vanilla but I inhaled the Clorox smells of a swimming pool.

I pushed her hair to the side like I was taking direction from a photographer and committed the scene to memory. Her lips were around me like I was an object of pure lust. They were parted and stuck out in an unselfconscious display. It was artless and pornographic. She moved her head up and down as if she needed to feel my whole length, and then she held tight as she plunged down as far down as she could. She took me with just her mouth. Then with her hands and her mouth. But her mouth was always around me. I watched. I felt. I tried to imprint her on my thoughts.

I wanted to make it last. My mind was calculating the odds of the sound of the door opening followed by a stumbling shuffle, which meant drunken company, when all I wanted was her alone. I wanted more. I wanted to see her eyes. I wanted to kiss those lips and hold her body next to mine. It wouldn't happen.

I could feel how she was concentrating on me, but not all of me. And then by instinct I moved my hands around to hold her head just so, and I pushed that little bit more into her mouth. It was unconscious. It was needful. It said yes, you're perfect that way. You're all I want. She made a sound. It was a sigh. It was an unmistakable sound. I pushed that much further. I held her head steady and pushed into her. She moved into a different side of giving. There was a murmured "yes."

I was past a point of no return. I lost control. I kept my hands on her head but took them off the wheel. I felt that hot wave run from my cock into my body and from there into her mouth and down her throat. I loved her. I said it in the way I gave myself to the feeling. It mattered not: the time, nor place, nor who might walk through that door and with those sounds coming from the stall know everything there was to know about me.

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Heidi, my love... only you beneath the moon or under the sun. I ran her tune through my head and moved my fingers as if they were pressing keys on my saxophone. I waited till it was 10 p.m. and she was done with work. She walked out to her car, which was parked near the back of the parking lot per management instruction. Customers got the good places up front.

I wondered aloud afterward, as she stood up and adjusted herself in the confines of the stall, if she wanted to see me on Saturday night. You know, maybe put down some roots. She changed the subject. Maybe another time, she said, I have a better idea.

She said: it will be dark when I get off work on Tuesday. There's not much light in the back part of the lot where the employees park. I'll be alone. I'll be available. My car has a big backseat. What will you do?

I knew what I would do. I'd wait for her. I'd stalk her like the animal I was. I'd forgo the ride to the grocery store and that look of love / lust. With all my heart I'd push her into the backseat and force myself on her. I'd cum in her mouth.